What you know changes how you see things

Researchers at the George Washington University have gained important insight into how the human brain processes an object in the visual system and where in the brain this processing takes place. Their study, "Mugs and Plants: Object Semantic Knowledge Alters Perceptual Processing with Behavioral Ramifications," shows people perceive objects differently depending on their prior knowledge and experience with that object.

The findings could have important implications in applied settings such as medical displays, cognitive assistants, and product and environmental design, according to the researchers.

"Since the way we perceive objects determines how we interact with them, it is important to visually process them quickly and with high detail" Sarah Shomstein, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at GW said. "However, the way our eyes perceive and process an object can be different depending on what we know about this object. Our study shows, for the first time, that if we recognize an object as a tool, we perceive it faster but with less detail. If we recognize an object as a non-tool, we perceive it slower but with higher detail."

To determine how the human brain processes an object visually, Shomstein and Dick Dubbelde, a recent PhD graduate at GW and co-author on the study, showed participants several images of objects that can be easily manipulated by hand such as a coffee mug, snow shovel or screwdriver, and several images of objects that are infrequently manipulated by hand, such as a potted plant, a picture frame or a fire hydrant. For half of the experiment, a small gap could be cut out of the bottom of each object. For the other half of the experiment, the objects could flicker on the screen. The team asked participants to report the presence or absence of a gap or the flicker, which helped the researchers figure out the speed and detail of object processing, and also which regions of the brain were being used to process the object.

Researchers found that objects usually manipulated by your hands are perceived faster than non-manipulable objects, making it easier to see the flickering. Alternatively, objects that we usually do not manipulate are perceived with greater detail than manipulable objects, making it easier to see the small gaps.

"The differences in perception between 'mugs' and 'plants' in both speed and detail of perception means that these objects are sorted by the visual system for processing in different brain regions," Dubbelde said. "In other words, your knowledge of the object's purpose actually determines where in the brain object processing will occur and how well you will perceive it."

The study also showed that if you interfere with object recognition by making it harder to recognize an object as either manipulable or not manipulable -- for example, by turning it upside down -- then the differences in the speed and detail perception of the objects disappear.

Read more at Science Daily

Narcissistic bosses stymie knowledge flow, cooperation inside organizations

Narcissism is a prominent trait among top executives, and most people have seen the evidence in their workplaces.

These individuals believe they have superior confidence, intelligence and judgment, and will pursue any opportunity to reinforce those inflated self-views and gain admiration. According to new research from the University of Washington, narcissism can also cause knowledge barriers within organizations.

When different units in the same company share information, it boosts performance and creates a competitive advantage. Narcissists hinder this knowledge transfer due to a sense of superiority that leads them to overestimate the value of internal knowledge and underestimate the value of external knowledge.

"Many big companies are what one would describe as multi-business firms, an organizational form where you have a corporate parent and subsidiary units," said co-author Abhinav Gupta, associate professor of management in the UW Foster School of Business. "The financial logic for why these firms exist is so that knowledge and skills that reside in one unit can be used in another unit."

But units don't work with each other as much as companies would like, Gupta said. The study, published April 4 in the Strategic Management Journal, revealed that certain personality traits of executives -- specifically narcissism -- impede the flow of information.

"Narcissism affects people's desire to be distinctive," Gupta said. "It's correlated by people wanting glory for themselves. We hypothesized that business-unit heads that have those traits would be the ones to say, 'We don't want to work with you. We have sufficient skills and knowledge and abilities that we will work independently.' That was very strongly borne out based on our research design."

The authors surveyed business units of a headhunting company in China that helps organizations recruit talent and search for technical personnel. These units must share knowledge about building talent pools, identifying skills and persuading prospects to accept offers.

Researchers asked unit heads to rate, among other factors, their own narcissistic traits, the environmental complexity of the local market and perceived competition with other units. They then asked deputies to rate the level of knowledge imported from other units.

Narcissism was measured using the self-report Narcissistic Personality Inventory 16-item scale, which presents pairs of statements and asks individuals to select the one that best describes them. One pair consisted of "I like to be the center of attention" and "I prefer to blend in with the crowd."

The study found that unit-head narcissism can prevent knowledge sharing. That tendency diminished in fast-changing or complex environments because narcissists had an excuse to pursue external ideas. But when businesses have high inter-unit competition, narcissists are more tempted to distinguish themselves from other units.

The research has multiple implications for companies, Gupta said. For example, when filling roles that require knowledge sharing, managers might watch for signs of narcissistic personality traits. Companies could also design an organization and reward structure that encourages cooperation among current personnel.

"There are two views of how multi-business firms create value," Gupta said. "One perspective is you want to run an organization like an internal market. All the units are actively competing for resources from the corporate headquarters, and that competition is what enables superior performance.

"This research kind of goes against the grain of that. If you create the perception of competition inside an organization, then that will have some downstream effects. You will be essentially foregoing some essential knowledge-sharing activities."

Read more at Science Daily

People with less memory loss in old age gain more knowledge

Do cognitive abilities change together, or do they change independently of each other? An international research team from the USA, Sweden, and Germany involving the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has presented new findings now published in Science Advances.

At the age of 20, people usually find it easier to learn something new than at the age of 70. People aged 70, however, typically know more about the world than those aged 20. In lifespan psychology this is known as the difference between "fluid" and "crystallized" cognitive abilities. Fluid abilities primarily capture individual differences in brain integrity at the time of measurement, whereas crystallized abilities primarily capture individual differences in accumulated knowledge.

Accordingly, fluid and crystallized abilities differ in their average age trajectories. Fluid abilities like memory already start to decline in middle adulthood. In contrast. crystallized abilities such as vocabulary show increases until later adulthood and only evince decline in advanced old age.

This divergence in the average trajectories of fluid and crystallized abilities has led to the assumption that people can compensate for fluid losses with crystallized gains. For instance, if an individual's memory declines, this loss, it is assumed, can be compensated for by an increase in knowledge.

A study of a research team from Germany, Sweden and the USA now shows that this compensation hypothesis has more limits than previously claimed. The researchers analyzed data from two longitudinal studies, the Virginia Cognitive Aging Project (VCAP) study from the USA and the Betula study from Sweden. In the VCAP study, 3633 female and 1933 male participants aged 18-99 years at the first occasion of measurement were followed for a period of up to 18 years and assessed up to eight times. The Betula study involved 1803 women and 1517 men who were between 25 and 95 years old at the first measurement occasion and examined up to four times over 18 years.

The research team used multivariate methods of change measurement to examine the extent to which individual differences in changes in crystallized abilities are related to individual differences in fluid changes. The findings are clear: The correlations between the two types of changes observed in both studies were very high. Thus, individual differences in cognitive development are, to a large extent, domain-general and do not follow the fluid-crystallized divide. What this means is that individuals who show greater losses in fluid abilities simultaneously show smaller gains in crystallized abilities, and persons whose fluid abilities hardly decline show large gains in crystallized abilities.

These findings are in accordance with the everyday observation that some people remain mentally fit in many areas into very old age while others' cognitive functioning declines across the board.

"In intelligence research, people often talk about a general factor or g-factor of intelligence that expresses the commonality of different cognitive abilities," says the lead author of the study, Elliot Tucker-Drob of the Department of Psychology and the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. "In previous work, we have already demonstrated that not only individual differences in cognitive abilities at a given point in time can be captured by a general factor, but also changes of cognitive abilities. Our new results confirm this finding and demonstrate that changes in crystallized abilities can indeed be subsumed under a general factor of common change."

"Our findings call for a revision of textbook knowledge," adds Ulman Lindenberger, Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. "If those who show the largest fluid losses also show the smallest crystallized gains, then this places tighter limits on the compensatory power of knowledge than previously believed." For example, people whose memory is declining, also show a low gain in knowledge, even though they are in most need of such gains. Conversely, individuals with small fluid losses and strong crystallized gains are less likely to be in need of relying on compensatory processes to begin with.

Read more at Science Daily

Language trade-off? No, bilingual children reliably acquire English by age 5

In the United States, more than 12 million children hear a minority language at home from birth. More than two-thirds hear English as well, and they reach school age with varying levels of proficiency in two languages. Parents and teachers often worry that acquiring Spanish will interfere with children's acquisition of English.

A first-of-its kind study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families led by researchers at Florida Atlantic University finds that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children reliably acquire English, and their total language knowledge is greater to the degree that they also acquire Spanish.

Results of the study, published in the journal Child Development, show that children with the most balanced bilingualism were those who heard the most Spanish at home and who had parents with high levels of education in Spanish.

Importantly, these children did not have lower English skills than the English-dominant children. Children's level of English knowledge was independent of their level of Spanish knowledge. U.S.-born children who live in Spanish-speaking homes and who also are exposed to English from infancy tend to become English dominant by age 5 -- but some more so than others.

The study, conducted in collaboration with The George Washington University, is the first to describe the outcome of early dual language exposure in terms of bilingual skill profiles that reflect the relations in the data between children's skill levels in their two languages. The study addresses the question of what level of English and Spanish skill can be expected in 5-year-old children who come from Spanish-speaking homes in which they also hear English in varying amounts.

"We found that early in development, children who hear two languages take a little longer to acquire each language than children who hear only one language; however, there is no evidence that learning two languages is too difficult for children," said Erika Hoff, Ph.D., lead author and a professor in the Department of Psychology within FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science on the FAU Broward Campuses.

A key finding from the study is that low levels of proficiency in two languages at age 5 is not a typical outcome of exposure to two languages. Bilingual children who have weak skills in both languages at age 5 may have an underlying impairment or inadequate environmental support for language acquisition.

For the study, Hoff and co-authors Michelle K. Tulloch, a Ph.D. student in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science; and Cynthia Core, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences within the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University, used an examiner-administered test to measure the English and Spanish expressive vocabulary of 126 U.S.-born 5 year olds from Spanish-speaking families with one or two immigrant parents who have been exposed to Spanish since birth and who have also heard English at home in varying amounts, either from birth or soon thereafter. They also measured indicators of the children's language learning ability.

Prior to this study, differences among bilingual children were described primarily in terms of dominance (English-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals) and balance, but that turns out not to be the only way in which bilinguals differ.

"Previous research has tended to treat bilingual children's development in each language as a separate outcome, rather than treating dual language skills as the single outcome of dual language exposure," said Hoff. "This approach not only fails to adequately capture the nature of children's dual language skills, it also leaves unaddressed the question of how the acquisition of one language is related to the acquisition of another."

Findings from this study suggest that dominance is not the same thing as proficiency. Bilinguals differ both in dominance and in total language knowledge. Teachers and clinicians cannot infer a bilingual child's language proficiency from that child's language dominance. There are balanced bilinguals at age 5 who have stronger English skills than some English-dominant bilinguals. Individual differences in dominance are significantly related to home exposure, although the function that relates exposure to dominance is biased toward English.

Balanced language exposure at home does not result in balanced proficiency; Spanish-dominant home exposure appears to be necessary. Individual differences in total language knowledge are significantly related to indicators of language-learning ability, measured in this study in terms of phonological memory and nonverbal intelligence.

Read more at Science Daily

How we retrieve our knowledge about the world

To understand the world, we arrange individual objects, people, and events into different categories or concepts. Concepts such as 'the telephone' consist primarily of visible features, i.e. shape and color, and sounds, such as ringing. In addition, there are actions, i.e. how we use a telephone.

However, the concept of telephone does not only arise in the brain when we have a telephone in front of us. It also appears when the term is merely mentioned. If we read the word "telephone," our brain also calls up the concept of telephone. The same regions in the brain are activated that would be activated if we actually saw, heard, or used a telephone. The brain thus seems to simulate the characteristics of a telephone when its name alone is mentioned.

Until now, however, it was unclear, depending on the situation, whether the entire concept of a telephone is called up or only individual features such as sounds or actions and whether only the brain areas that process the respective feature become active. So, when we think of a telephone, do we always think of all its features or only the part that is needed at the moment? Do we retrieve our sound knowledge when a phone rings, but our action knowledge when we use it?

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now found the answer: It depends on the situation. If, for example, the study participants thought of the sounds associated with the word "telephone," the corresponding auditory areas in the cerebral cortex were activated, which are also activated during actual hearing. When thinking about using a telephone, the somatomotor areas that underlie the involved movements came into action.

In addition to these sensory-dependent, so-called modality-specific areas, it was found that there are areas that process both sounds and actions together. One of these so-called multimodal areas is the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). It became active when both features were requested.

The researchers also found out that, in addition to characteristics based on sensory impressions and actions, there must be other criteria by which we understand and classify terms. This became apparent when the participants were only asked to distinguish between real and invented words. Here, a region that was not active for actions or sounds kicked in: the so-called anterior temporal lobe (ATL). The ATL therefore seems to process concepts abstractly or "amodally," completely detached from sensory impressions.

From these findings, the scientists finally developed a hierarchical model to reflect how conceptual knowledge is represented in the human brain. According to this model, information is passed on from one hierarchical level to the next and at the same time becomes more abstract with each step. On the lowest level, therefore, are the modality-specific areas that process individual sensory impressions or actions. These transmit their information to the multimodal regions such as the IPL, which process several linked perceptions simultaneously, such as sounds and actions. The amodal ATL, which represents features detached from sensory impressions, operates at the highest level. The more abstract a feature, the higher the level at which it is processed and the further it is removed from actual sensory impressions.

"We thus show that our concepts of things, people, and events are composed, on the one hand, of the sensory impressions and actions associated with them and, on the other hand, of abstract symbol-like features," explains Philipp Kuhnke, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. "Which features are activated depends strongly on the respective situation or task" added Kuhnke.

In a follow-up study in Cerebral Cortex, the researchers also found that modality-specific and multimodal regions work together in a situation-dependent manner when we retrieve conceptual features. The multimodal IPL interacted with auditory areas when retrieving sounds, and with somatomotor areas when retrieving actions. This showed that the interaction between modality-specific and multimodal regions determined the behavior of the study participants. The more these regions worked together, the more strongly the participants associated words with actions and sounds.

Read more at Science Daily

Knowing more about a virus threat may not satisfy you

People who rate themselves as highly knowledgeable about a new infectious disease threat could also be more likely to believe they don't know enough, a new study suggests.

In the case of this study, the infectious disease threat was the Zika virus. But the authors of the new study, published recently in the journal Risk Analysis, say the results could apply to the recent novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

"The Zika virus and the coronavirus have important things in common," said Shelly Hovick, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

"In both cases, they are shrouded in uncertainty and have received a lot of media attention. Our research looks at how people seek and process information when there is so much uncertainty."

One of the key findings of the new study: With limited information about Zika available, more knowledge was not that comforting.

"We found that the more people thought they knew, the more they realized they didn't know enough," said Austin Hubner, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at Ohio State.

"With the Zika virus, even the experts themselves didn't know much at the time. That's the same thing we're seeing with the coronavirus, and that's scary for people who believe they are at risk."

For the study, the researchers conducted an online survey of 494 people of childbearing age living in Florida in December 2016.

Florida residents were recruited for the study because it had the highest number of locally transmitted cases of Zika in the United States at the time.

Although most people infected with Zika don't have symptoms, pregnant women with the virus have a higher likelihood of their child being born with a specific birth defect.

Zika is primarily spread by mosquitoes, but it can also be transmitted from men and women to their sexual partners and through blood transfusions.

In the survey, respondents were asked a variety of questions about their knowledge and attitudes toward seeking information, how they processed what they learned about the Zika virus, and their plans for seeking more information.

As expected, participants who were pregnant or wanted to get pregnant (and men whose wives were in those situations) felt more at risk from Zika and were more likely to say they felt scared of Zika. But they weren't the only ones who felt worried about Zika.

"Novel risks like Zika or coronavirus may make some people react differently than well-known risks like cancer or the flu," Hovick said.

"Even if the data suggest someone is at low risk, the lack of information may make some people feel they are at high risk."

The findings showed that people who felt they didn't know enough about Zika didn't intend to spend more time than others seeking information. That was probably because they realized that there wasn't more information available, Hovick said.

But they did spend more time processing the information they uncovered and were more likely to agree with statements like "After I encounter information about Zika, I am likely to stop and think about it."

These findings suggest it is important for public health agencies to continuously update the public, Hovick said. Those who are worried or concerned about risks such as Zika are likely to process the information they encounter deeply, but they may not seek information on their own.

Participants were also more likely to intend to seek information about Zika if they believed other people expected them to do so. They were more likely to want to search for information if they agreed with statements like "People in my life whose opinions I value seek information about Zika."

"We should aim not just to provide information, but also shape messages that encourage people to stay on top of the situation, particularly in high-uncertainty environments," Hovick said.

"You have to make it clear that seeking more knowledge is something that their friends and family expect of them."

Hovick said they have considered trying to replicate the study with the current coronavirus outbreak, but that Zika virus was slower developing.

Read more at Science Daily

A lack of background knowledge can hinder reading comprehension

The purpose of going to school is to learn, but students may find certain topics difficult to understand if they don't have the necessary background knowledge. This is one of the conclusions of a research article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Background knowledge plays a key role in students' reading comprehension -- our findings show that if students don't have sufficient related knowledge, they'll probably have difficulties understanding text," says lead researcher Tenaha O'Reilly of Educational Testing Service (ETS)'s Center for Research on Human Capital in Education. "We also found that it's possible to measure students' knowledge quickly by using natural language processing techniques. If a student scores below the knowledge threshold, they'll probably have trouble comprehending the text."

Previous research has shown that students who lack sufficient reading skills, including decoding and vocabulary, fare poorly relative to their peers. But the research of O'Reilly and ETS colleagues Zuowei Wang and John Sabatini suggests that a knowledge threshold may also be an essential component of reading comprehension.

The researchers examined data from 3,534 high-school students at 37 schools in the United States. The students completed a test that measured their background knowledge on ecosystems. For the topical vocabulary section of the test, the students saw a list of 44 words and had to decide which were related to the topic of ecosystems. They also completed a multiple-choice section that was designed to measure their factual knowledge.

Then, after reading a series of texts on the topic of ecosystems, the students completed 34 items designed to measure how well they understood the texts. These comprehension items tapped into their ability to summarize what they had read, recognize opinions and incorrect information, and apply what they had read to reason more broadly about the content.

The researchers used a statistical technique called broken-line regression -- often used to identify an inflection point in a data set -- to analyze the students' performance.

The results revealed that a background-knowledge score of about 33.5, or about 59% correct, functioned as a performance threshold. Below this score, background knowledge and comprehension were not noticeably correlated; above the threshold score, students' comprehension appeared to increase as their background knowledge increased.

Additional results indicated that the pattern could not be fully explained by the level of students' knowledge on a different topic -- what mattered was their background knowledge of ecosystems.

The researchers found that students' ability to identify specific keywords was a fairly strong predictor whether they would perform above or below the threshold. That is, correctly identifying ecosystems, habitat, and species as topically relevant was more strongly linked with students' comprehension than was identifying bioremediation, densities, and fauna.

The findings underscore the importance of having reached a basic knowledge level to be able to read and comprehend texts across different subjects:

"Reading isn't just relevant to English Language Arts classes but also to reading in the content areas," says O'Reilly. "The Common Core State Standards highlight the increasing role of content area and disciplinary reading. We believe that the role of background knowledge in students' comprehension and learning might be more pronounced when reading texts in the subject areas."

The researchers plan to explore whether a similar kind of knowledge threshold emerges in other topic areas and domains; they note that it will be important to extend the research by focusing on diverse measures and populations.

If the pattern holds, the findings could have important applications for classroom teaching, given the availability of knowledge assessments that can be administered without taking valuable time away from instruction.

Read more at Science Daily

What the brains of people with excellent general knowledge look like

The brains of people with excellent general knowledge are particularly efficiently wired. This was shown by neuroscientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin using magnetic resonance imaging. "Although we can precisely measure the general knowledge of people and this wealth of knowledge is very important for an individual's journey through life, we currently know little about the links between general knowledge and the characteristics of the brain," says Dr. Erhan Genç from the Department of Biopsychology in Bochum. The team describes the results in the European Journal of Personality on 28 July 2019.

Brain images and knowledge test

The researchers examined the brains of 324 men and women with a special form of magnetic resonance imaging called diffusion tensor imaging. This makes it possible to reconstruct the pathways of nerve fibres and thus gain an insight into the structural network properties of the brain. By means of mathematical algorithms, the researchers assigned an individual value to the brain of each participant, which reflected the efficiency of his or her structural fibre network.

The participants also completed a general knowledge test called the Bochum Knowledge Test, which was developed in Bochum by Dr. Rüdiger Hossiep. It is comprised of over 300 questions from various fields of knowledge such as art and architecture or biology and chemistry. The team led by Erhan Genç finally investigated whether the efficiency of structural networking is associated with the amount of general knowledge stored.

The result: People with a very efficient fibre network had more general knowledge than those with less efficient structural networking.

Linking pieces of information

"We assume that individual units of knowledge are dispersed throughout the entire brain in the form of pieces of information," explains Erhan Genç. "Efficient networking of the brain is essential in order to put together the information stored in various areas of the brain and successfully recall knowledge content."

An example: To answer the question of which constants occur in Einstein's theory of relativity, you have to connect the meaning of the term "constant" with knowledge of the theory of relativity. "We assume that more efficient networking of the brain contributes to better integration of pieces of information and thus leads to better results in a general knowledge test," says the Bochum-based researcher.

From Science Daily